amiga-news.de - A-EON allegedly no longer has an AmigaOS 4 license (Update 2)

06.Jun.2021 A-EON allegedly no longer has an AmigaOS 4 license (Update 2)
For months, amiga-news.de has been receiving reports that the licensing agreement between Hyperion and A-EON expired at the turn of the year - and indeed the "X5000" product as well as all versions of AmigaOS have been removed from Amigakit's webstore months ago. But until now, nobody was willing to have his claims published as a news item.

Today, Hyperion's former technical director Costel 'Cyborg' Mincea confirmed (German) in a discussion on os4welt.de that the OEM agreement between A-EON and Hyperion has expired: "The OEM contracts for the X5000 and Tabor each ran for 5 years and were negotiated by me in 2015. Now we are in the 6th year ... apparently no new contracts have been negotiated yet. At least the old contracts were not extended. At the end of that period, I was still in management, but A-EON showed zero interest when we approached them."

Since Mincea is no longer part of Hyperion manegement, we approached Ben Hermans (Hyperion) and Trevor Dickinson (A-EON), asking for a statement regarding this issue. Ben Hermans declined to comment. Trevor Dickinson tells us he forwarded our inquiry to A-EON's managing directory, Matthew Leaman. Dickinson does confirm though, that (quote) "A-EON holds a worldwide licence to use the AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4.x names in connection with its hardware should it wish to do so".

Note from staff: As far as we know, the OEM contracts are seaprate from the trademark license, so Dickinson's statement and Mincea's claims do not contradict each other. Already in summer 2019, somebody started to remove the term "AmigaOne" from AmigaKit's webstore and A-EON's wiki. Back then, Trevor Dickinson had stated several times (1, 2) that the product his company was selling was still called "AmigaOne X5000".

Update: (06.06.2021, 23:30, cg)

Added statement from Trevor Dickinson. Removed speculation addressed by said statement from the 'note from staff'.

Update: (07.06.2021, 18:30, cg)

In additional contributions to the discussion on os4welt.de, Mincea specifies and corrects his statements regarding the actual schedule: according to him, the OEM contract for the X5000 already expired in Juli 2019 while the contract for Tabor/A1222 was signed in August 2015 and specified a term of four years. He also gives a more detailed overview what the actual OEM contract regulates.

Note from staff: The "July 2019" date Mincea now specifies for the end of the X5000 contract matches the beginning of A-EON's/Amigakit's efforts to remove the "AmigaOne" trademark from their websites. (cg) (Translation: cg)

[News message: 06. Jun. 2021, 22:19] [Comments: 5 - 10. Jun. 2021, 01:07]
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